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Comment by budmang | Hacker News Reader

"Think free as in free speech, not free beer."

It's not under any license, it's just 'free'. We've talked about putting the Storage Pods under a license, and may at some point since we get this question periodically and picking a license that people are familiar with may make it more clear that we really are giving away the design.

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Seems like the Creative Commons licenses were designed for this use case: easy to understand formalizations of just what rights if any are reserved. Maybe pick one of those?

i might be wrong, but i'm fairly certain you have rights that you need to explicitly give up in the form of a license in order for it to be "free"

It's a list of commodity parts and some drawings. If you use this information to build your own pod, who would know and who would care?

If you start selling them as your own product, maybe that would be an issue.

I was wondering about this too. Lists of commodity parts might be treated like recipes, which are not subject to copyright per http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl122.html, but the drawings are a different matter.

That quote refers to something very specific and you may not want to align yourself or your thoughts about licensing with that movement.

The creative commons and OSI are two excellent places to start looking at licenses. creativecommons.org and opensource.org

Not trying to align with any movement. Just saying that we give the design away. Appreciate all the feedback and we'll re-look at adding a license.

To be clear on our philosophy - we don't want to restrict people from building these for their own purposes, modifying them, giving away the design, selling the boxes, etc.

I'd suggest using the following Creative Commons license:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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